Referral Fee

Referral Fee is also called Commission, Referral Fee on Item Price, referral-fee-per-item

Referral fee is a core fee, charged to all 3rd party sellers selling on Amazon. Amazon charges you a percentage of sales, and in exchange they allow you to use their online marketplace.

For example, if you sell a pet supplies item for 10 USD, Amazon will charge you 1.50 USD referral fee (which is 15% for Pet Supplies). You are essentially paying for the privilege of being listed on Amazon Marketplace, getting traffic and exposure, while you do almost nothing, apart from listing your item to sell. It’s like Amazon is your affiliate, and you pay them a commission on every sale that they bring you.

Referral Fee percentage can vary. Most product categories are charged 15%, but it can be as low as 6% or as high as 45% in some categories.

Principal

Principal is also called item-price, Product charges

Principal Amount is what Amazon calls the main bulk part of the price that customer pays for your product, before shipping and taxes. Most often this amount is the same as the price your customer paid.

When your price includes sales tax (such as VAT), then your Principal is Price minus the Sales Tax. Amazon separates the two to later show Sales Tax as a separate item in your transaction details:

Principal + Tax = Your Sales Price

Variable Closing Fee & Fixed Closing Fee

Variable Closing Fee and Fixed Closing Fee is also called VariableClosingFee, FixedClosingFee

Closing Fee is essentially an additional Amazon Referral Fee, charged on Media items like books, DVDs, Video Games and Music.

Amazon keeps changing the way they charge closing fees, it used to be based on percentage of the price, later it had minimums and maximums, then it became only one fixed charge.. So they sometimes call it Variable, sometimes Fixed - but it’s all about the same thing, a Closing Fee.

Whatever the calculation formula Amazon uses, Closing Fee is just an extra Referral Fee that they charge for media items.

I am not so sure why Amazon is charging additional fee for all Media items. Maybe it’s because they originally started as an online bookstore, and feel that they are the best place for selling books and video games, so therefore charge a premium for that category?

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon - in 1998, when Amazon was just an online bookstore.

For example, if you sell a book for $9.99, you will get charged a flat $1.80 Closing Fee, in addition to Referral and FBA fee:

It's very hard to make money with Media items priced under $10. Amazon Fees, Shipping costs and Storage fees basically eat up all your profit margins and there is not much left for you at the end.

Shipping Charge

Shipping Charge is also called Shipping, shipping-price, ShippingCharge

Shipping Charge is the amount customer pays for shipping, to get the purchased item shipped to his house. This charge is named the same, no matter if it's you or Amazon doing the shipping.

If it’s the Amazon that does the shipping, then you will also see a Shipping Chargeback entry on the same order.

Normally if you do Merchant Fulfilled (MFN) and ship products to customers yourself, this Shipping Charge amount will be paid out to you by Amazon, together with your sales income.

Shipping Chargeback

Shipping chargeback appears on your transactions when Amazon is the one doing the shipping.

Your customer pays Amazon for shipping, so Amazon shows it as income on your transactions. But because you're not the one doing the actual shipping, they also show a Shipping Chargeback in the same transaction. Meaning, Amazon takes back the shipping income that they just gave you.

Unfortunately, having Shipping charge added in to revenue, where you're not even doing the shipping yourself, inflates your revenue figures:

Inflated revenue is something you may want to avoid, especially if presenting your numbers to potential partners or performing any type of financial analysis. Therefore, it's better not to use Amazon reports to pull your revenue figures.

Shopkeeper normalizes your revenue, while still showing you all shipping related transactions on a specific order. It displays your revenue normally - just as you would in your own financial statements:

Shopkeeper does not inflate your revenue figures like Amazon does. Shopkeeper includes Shipping Chargeback into your Revenue calculation, instead of showing it in Expenses.

Amazon Shipping Promo

Amazon Shipping Promo is a discount on shipping that Amazon provides customers, without you as a seller having nothing to do with it.

For example, a customer has no Prime membership, so he has to pay for shipping. He may be reluctant to do shopping on Amazon, because of that. So Amazon incentivizes customers to shop more, offering them special shipping Promos.

There are many different kinds of Shipping Promos that Amazon runs. But in general, none of them affect you as a seller, except for the inflated revenue. Same like with Shipping Charge & Shipping Chargeback.

If you click on the plus icon to expand it for more info, you will see a specific Amazon Promo name that was used:

Here is a list of a few random Amazon Promo IDs, for you to see what they usually look like. These Amazon Promo IDs appear in apps like Shopkeeper, because apps can read in more detailed data via Amazon API.

UK Core Free Delivery 2015/04/08 23-59-11-975

US Core Free Shipping

Amazon PLCC Free-Financing Universal Merchant Next Day Promotion

MX Core Free Shipping 2015/06/08 16-42-41-775

UK Core Free Delivery 2015/04/08 23-59-11-975

Amazon PLCC Free-Financing Universal Merchant-2565117

Amazon PLCC Free-Financing Universal Merchant Prime-Free-SameDay 2018

US Core Free Shipping Promotion A3JU1FCINF5SD0

JP Core Free Shipping 2016/03/29 6-38-40-593

And here is how it appears on Seller Central:

As you see, in Seller Central, you will often not even see a specific Amazon Promo ID. It will just have Shipping Charge and Shipping Promo Rebate.

Gift Wrap Charge

Gift Wrap Charge is also called gift-wrap-price.

Gift wrap charge is a fee your customers pay to get their purchased products wrapped in gift paper and have a card sent with it as well.

To have the Gift Wrap option enabled on your listings, you have to select these checkboxes in Seller Central:

That way the buyers can see Gift Options when checking out:

You may ask, ok, but who is doing the actual gift wrapping?

If your listing is Amazon-fulfilled (FBA), then Amazon does the gift wrapping and they also keep the gift wrap charge. All you need to do is enable the gift wrap options on your listings like above, and it will just automatically become available for your buyers.

If your listing is Merchant-fulfilled, you will be the one doing the gift wrapping. For this option to be fully enabled, you will need to setup a few extra things in your Seller Central. First, go to Settings->Gift Options:

Then your buyers will be presented with your Gift Wrap options, and Amazon will send you all collected Gift Wrap Charges along with your payout.

Gift Wrap Chargeback

Gift Wrap Chargeback appears in your transactions together with a Gift Wrap Charge, in cases where Amazon is the one doing the Gift Wrapping.

That is, when your listing is FBA (Amazon-Fulfilled), Amazon is collecting a gift wrap charge from your customers and it appears in your transactions as your revenue. But because it's not you who is doing the gift wrapping, Amazon is also adding in a Gift Wrap Chargeback, to immediately take the collected Gift Wrap Charge away from you.

Unfortunately, this inflates your revenue figure:

If you want to do a financial analysis, or present your numbers to investors/partners, you shouldn't really use inflated Revenue that Amazon shows in their downloadable reports. It is better to use apps like Shopkeeper, which normalize your revenue, still showing all relevant transactions from Amazon:

Using inflated revenue directly from Amazon reports can be good and bad. Higher revenue figure means you can appear to be making more money to investors, potential business buyers, your followers, potential hires, etc.

But it can also be bad if you get charged for some things based on revenue. It also adds up to complexity of bookkeeping, and confusion whether you should show gift wrap chargeback as costs, or simply ignore all this math and declare revenue without showing gift wrap activity at all. I recommend showing all like Shopkeeper does, simply because then it’s much easier to follow the numbers from Amazon reports if you keep track of all the same transactions that they do.

In the end, if you’re just a small company, these details don’t matter so much. Just do what is the easiest for you.

Gift Wrap Commission

Gift Wrap Commission is basically a referral fee, charged on all gift wrap services that were provided by you, the seller. If Amazon is the one gift-wrapping it, you don't get charged a commission.

Here is how the normal gift wrap commission charge appears in Shopkeeper, when it's fulfilled by you, the Merchant (MFN):

There is one more non-obvious situation, where Amazon charges you Gift Wrap Commission.

If you are running a promo, and offer your customer 100% off (so that the final price that the customer pays is 0.00) - then Amazon charges you a Gift Wrap Commission. AND also a small Referral Fee and Shipping Holdback Fee.

Amazon cannot charge you more than minimum Referral Fee because Referral Fee is based on sales revenue. Now the revenue is 0.00. So they also charge you two other small minimum amounts - Shipping Holdback Fee and Gift Wrap Commission Fee. This is their way to make money out of the zero-amount-sale that happened on their platform:

Special case where Amazon charges you 3 kinds of fees to offset your 100% promos.

Shipping Holdback Fee

Shipping Holdback Fee is also called Shipping HB, ShippingHB

Shipping Holdback fee is basically a referral fee, charged on the Shipping that is completed by you, the seller (MFN). If Amazon is the one doing the shipping, then Shipping Holdback Fee is not charged.

In the old times Amazon used to charge only one referral fee, based on the item price - and sellers were abusing it. Some sellers were charging like $0.50 for the product and an inflated amount for shipping (say, $18). This is how they were avoiding Amazon referral fees, and were only getting charged a minimum referral fee of $0.15 based on the product price.

Eventually Amazon caught up with it, and implemented a fee similar to referral fee for all Shipping that is Merchant-Fulfilled.

Here is how the numbers look like in Shopkeeper, when you do the shipping yourself:

There is another, less obvious situation, where Amazon charges you Shipping Holdback fee, even if there is no Shipping involved.

If you offer a 100% promo to your customer, and they pay $0.00 at the end of their purchase, Amazon then charges you 3 kinds of minimum fees, to offset the cost of you using their marketplace.

Those 3 fees are:

Minimum Referral Fee

Minimum Gift Wrap Commission

Minimum Shipping Holdback Fee

Here is an example:

3 kinds of fees charged by Amazon, when you do 100% off promo.

High Volume Listing Fee

High Volume Listing Fee is also called HighVolumeListingFee.

High Volume Listing Fee applies mostly to dropshippers, or any sellers that have more than 100,000 active but dead listings on Amazon. For every extra listing above the first 100,000 listings without sales in the last 12 months, Amazon charges a monthly fee of $0.005.

There are three rules which Amazon uses to count the ‘dead’ listings. It has to satisfy the following:

You have an active offer for that asin, meaning there is at least 1 unit in stock that is available for sale.

AND

This is not a new listing, and this ASIN was created more than 12 months ago.

AND

This ASIN did not have any sale from any seller in the last 12 months.

You see, the good thing is, that you share this burden with other sellers. If any of you have had sales in the last 12 months, then this listing will not count as ‘dead’.

In Amazon Europe, HighVolumeListingFee also exists, but different rules apply:

If you exceed 2 million SKUs in a given month, you will be charged. For example, for each active non-media SKU over 2 million, a fee of €0.0004 per SKU will apply. See the most recent fees on Amazon page:

Non-subscription Fee Adjustment

NonSubscriptionFeeAdjustment means that Amazon has either overpaid you for something or didn't charge you what they should have, and now they are correcting it.

Here's an example email you may receive along with the Non-subscription Fee Adjustment appearing in your reports:

The type of charge that they didn't charge you on time will be different in every case, and often they correct those with appropriately named Adjustments, like PostageRefund_PostageAdjustment, TaxCertificationAdjustment, DebtAdjustment and so on.

But if the disbursement/your payment date has already passed, and they are correcting it after that settlement date, it will appear as Non-subscription Fee Adjustment.

Mostly.

Hehe. Those adjustments are always a bit messy. Each Amazon agent enters them a little differently, so you may have a wide range of all kinds of adjustments during your career as an Amazon seller. Something like this:

Tax

Tax is also called item-tax, base tax.

Tax is the amount of tax that Amazon customers are charged on their orders. Tax amount is directly dependant on your tax settings on Seller Central.

For example, if you collect Sales Tax VAT from your buyers in UK, you include VAT in your price.

Your tax settings in Seller Central will look something like this:

and VAT defaults page will look similar to this:

VAT settings on Amazon Seller Central

So if your product price is £15.31, then the VAT amount is £2.55:

When the order is Shipped, Amazon will show you tax breakdown on Seller Central Order page:

In apps like Shopkeeper, you will see the £12.76 amount being called Principal, and Product Tax will be called Tax - because that is how they appear in your data feed via the Amazon API:

Shipping Tax

One crappy thing about Shipping Tax is that you have to remit collected amount to the government yourself - EVEN if Amazon is the one doing the shipping. This is strange, right?

Here is an example how Amazon charges Shipping Tax to a buyer, but then never adds in a Shipping Chargeback for the seller. This means that the seller will need to remit this collected Shipping Tax amount in their own VAT remittance:

It's best to consult your accountant about this, but just know that this is a standard practice with Shipping Tax on Amazon.

Shopkeeper handles this situation by including the collected Shipping Tax amount in your Tax Payable. That way you see your true profit, and exact amount that you will have to remit at the end of the year:

Shopkeeper includes Shipping Tax into your Tax Payable, and subtracts it from your Profit.

If you sell on Amazon USA, shipping tax can be either collected or not collected, based on state-specific rules and regulations. You as a seller will have to decide whether to collect sales tax on shipping or not.

Amazon Seller Central USA Shipping Tax settings for states where Amazon does not automatically collect & remit tax for you

In Amazon USA Seller Central, for those states that Amazon does not have agreements yet to collect sales tax on your behalf automatically, you will need to manually indicate whether you want to collect Shipping Tax or not. I recommend referring to this guide first:

Gift Wrap Tax

You may not know this, but you are liable to remit collected Tax on Gift Wrap, EVEN if Amazon is the one doing the actual gift-wrapping, and keeping the Gift Wrap charges.

So when you remit your collected sales tax at the end of the year for VAT for example, don't forget to add the amounts for collected Gift Wrap Tax. Consult your accountant for more info on this, but just be aware Amazon does not remit collected Tax for Gift Wrap services that they performed - YOU have to do it.

Amazon leaves you to remit collected sales tax on the gift wrap charges, EVEN if they are the ones doing the gift wrapping.

And that makes you see the actual profit you made, minus the sales tax collected.

You can double check it on your Seller Central:

If you sell in USA, Gift Wrap Tax can be either collected or not collected, based on state-specific rules and regulations. You as a seller will have to research and decide whether to collect sales tax on gift wrap or not, in each specific state.

For some states, Amazon is automatically collecting sales tax and remitting it on your behalf. Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Washington and many others. In that case, you don't need to worry about collected Gift Wrap Tax.

Note that according to Amazon, your Sales Proceeds (Revenue) is $32.12. This is inflated, because in the same transaction they are showing chargebacks as expenses. You may not want inflated revenue figures, if you are to present your numbers to potential investors, partners, etc.

Shopkeeper does not inflate your revenues, like Amazon does. Both Gift Wrap charge and all chargebacks are summed up in Revenue amount, instead of showing chargebacks as expenses. This normalizes your revenues and you don't appear like you are making more money when you aren't.

Sales Tax Service Fee

Sales Tax Service Fee is also called Sales Tax Collection Fee, SalesTaxCollectionFee

Sales Tax Service Fee is charged when Amazon collects sales tax on behalf of you, the seller - but does not remit it. Instead, they send it to you together with payment and you are the one who will be remitting it to the authorities.

Here is how you will see Sales Tax Collection Fee displayed on Amazon Seller Central:

For Amazon to know that you want them to collect sales tax for you, you need to indicate this in your settings:

And then indicate what % of sales tax you want to be collecting, for which regions - all depending on your individual situation. If you are incorporated in Canada, you will have to collect HST from all Canadian buyers. If you have an LLC in Idaho, you will have to collect sales tax from all Idaho customers, and so on.

So if the tax amount collected in Canada for HST was $7.03, Amazon will charge you $0.20 Sales Tax Collection Fee, and will send you $7.03 together with your payment. At the end of your fiscal year (or maybe sooner if you do quarterly HST payments), you will need to remit this amount to the CRA.

Marketplace Facilitator Tax

Marketplace Facilitator Tax is also called MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Principal, MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Total Tax.

Marketplace Facilitator Tax is a tax collected & remitted by Amazon on your behalf, due to agreements with the specific states in USA. Eventually all states will have such agreements and sales tax will be collected & remitted for you automatically in all of USA.

You don't have to do anything, and there is no extra cost to you. But Marketplace Facilitator Tax will show up in your Seller Central transactions, so you need to understand what they are:

There is a bit of grey area in how Amazon sellers currently handle sales tax in those USA states that do not have agreements with Amazon. Here is a video explaining it:

In short, you are liable to collect sales tax in any USA state where your business has a nexus. Having inventory in a state is one way to be considered having a nexus. And as you know, Amazon stores your inventory all over USA, so you have nexus in basically all of the states.

That means you are in fact liable to register for remitting sales tax in each state in USA.

Most sellers are not collecting sales tax in all states. It's huge overhead and extra costs to register and do remittances, which often would be higher costs than actual sales tax collected. So most sellers now are just standing in a 'grey area', waiting for Marketplace Facilitator Agreements between Amazon and all the states to be signed.

Here is an up-to-date list of agreements with the states that are currently signed by Amazon:

Shopkeeper will normalize your revenue, so that collected tax does not leave you with inflated revenue. Amazon inflates your revenue by showing collected tax as income, and tax chargeback as expenses. You don't want to appear as if you're making more money when you aren't:

There are other kinds of Marketplace Facilitator Tax Chargebacks: that you may see in your transactions:

Normally you are the one liable for Shipping Tax - meaning you are the one who has to remit it, EVEN if Amazon is the one doing the shipping. But in this case, the buyer is from one of the states that has automatic tax collection / facilitator agreement with Amazon, so Amazon does not send you the Shipping tax as they normally would - instead, they are keeping it and will remit it on your behalf.

MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Other is any other type of tax chargeback, which Amazon collects and remits on your behalf. For example, Amazon collects Gift Wrap Tax for you. Then, in the same transaction, you see MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-Other amount:

As you see, it is starting to get quite messy and confusing if you try to analyze Seller Central numbers via Order page.

Shopkeeper displays it more organized and does not inflate your revenue with items that have chargebacks in the same Amazon Order:

MarketplaceFacilitatorTax-RestockingFee appears in Refunds, which have Restocking Fees.

This tax would be charged for an order that a restocking fee was charged on, but not for all Marketplace Facilitator States.

Here is how such situation looks like:

When there is a Restocking Fee charged (with Refund), for some facilitator states instead of full tax refund to buyer, refunded tax is split into two parts, to account for tax on Restocking Fee.

According to Seller Central support, only some states collect tax on Restocking Fee, as per individual state Facilitator Tax agreements between state and Amazon.

CS Error Items

CS Error Items is also called CS_ERROR_ITEMS, CS_ERROR_NON_ITEMIZED, CSErrorNonItemized

This is an error adjustment, related to or performed by customer service department.

Most often it's a positive deposit to your account, made after Amazon overcharges you on something. To correct previous charges, they issue a deposit to you which shows up in Other transactions:

Sometimes an order-id is associated with it, and sometimes it is not.

Shopkeeper shows this adjustment either on a particular order-id, like this:

..or on the ASIN on the day that it was charged:

Even if a product had no sales on that day, Shopkeeper will still show all financial activity that happened during that day and is related to that product. For example, here, Amazon Fees were adjusted in a CS Error Items transaction.

Incorrect Fees Items

Incorrect Fees Items is also called INCORRECT_FEES_ITEMS, IncorrectFeesNonItemized, INCORRECT_FEES_NON_ITEMIZED.

This fee is exactly what it says - Amazon adjustments for incorrect fees.

Distinction between items and non-itemized is Amazon specific - they use the term item to mean an individual SKU, a separate product.

When the adjustment is non-itemized, no SKU is associated with that transaction. This means that incorrect charges were for a service that does not specify one SKU or had more than one SKU affected.

When the adjustment is IncorrectFeesItems - it means that Amazon has indicated which SKU and how many units of that SKU are affected by the adjustment. For example, they had incorrect measurements of your product, and you complained. Then Amazon will add in an adjustment, depositing you the difference that you overpaid, showing in the transaction on Seller Central, as 279 units of SKU KR-FG78-54R, calling it adjustment INCORRECT_FEES_ITEMS.

Shopkeeper shows Incorrect Fee adjustment on a particular date when it gets posted by Amazon. Even if there are no sales of that product on that day:

On June 26, in this example, Amazon posted an adjustment for Incorrect Fees in multiple EU countries at the same time. Shopkeeper shows these financial transactions, even though there were no sales of this product on June 26. That way you get the most complete financial picture of that day.

If Amazon does not specify which SKU was affected, Shopkeeper shows the adjustment amount in the Totals row on adjustment posted date:

Goodwill

Goodwill is also called Other Concession.

Goodwill is an amount issued to your customer by Amazon, when the customer is not entitled for this amount of refund. Most often, Goodwill concession is granted to compensate for negative customer service experience, late deliveries, lost packages and similar situations.

Amazon takes responsibility for Goodwill charge - so even though you will see it being deducted from your account, you will later see your account being credited for it (within 45 days).

Initially, the Goodwill amount which Amazon issues to your customer, appears as a charge to you, on Seller Central:

Within 45 days of this transaction, you will see an Inventory Reimbursement - Customer Return transaction, associated with the same order.

Here is the full sequence of financial events that happen when the product is refunded and extra goodwill amount is issued to your customer:

Order is placed - normal order transaction.

Refund is issued - normal refund transaction

Goodwill is issued to the customer - you get charged the amount they gave customer as a "bonus refund".

Goodwill is reimbursed to you - you get back the money you "paid" to your customer for being dissatisfied with Amazon experience.

Customer does not return the item to the warehouse in 45 days, so Amazon charges the customer and reimburses you for the unit.

... ooops, that step 5 has probably made this customer extra angry, as he was likely not aware he had to return the item to not get charged for it.. So he called, he complained, he got his refund and 45 dollars on top of it, and then - BAH - another unexpected charge, when he did not send in the item. Maybe he didn't even have the unit anymore. Pretty unfortunate situation.

Amazon does not have a special Goodwill Amount Reimbursement tag, so they reimburse you using a confusing Inventory Reimbursement tag.

This can make you think that you actually received the refunded item back in stock (as is the normal reason for Inventory Reimbursements). The confusing part is Quantity: 1. It may seem as if one unit was reimbursed, when in fact in this transaction it was not. Reimbursement was only for giving you back the Goodwill amount.

So if you rely solely on Seller Central reports for your accounting, you may use the Goodwill Reimbursement amount in your books incorrectly.

You can clearly see which reimbursement event was refunding you the Goodwill amount, and which reimbursement was for the unreturned unit to inventory.

Clawback

Clawback is also called Reversal Reimbursement, MISSING_FROM_INBOUND_CLAWBACK, COMPENSATED_CLAWBACK.

Clawback is when Amazon takes back ("claws back") the money that they paid you as a reimbursement before.

You could just watch this video I recorded about Amazon Clawbacks, instead of reading this section:

Here's a typical clawback event story:

Step 1. Amazon warehouse looses or damages your product, so they issue you a reimbursement to compensate for it. It is called FBA Inventory Reimbursement, and it looks like this in Seller Central:

Step 2: Amazon later rediscovers/finds lost item, so they take back ("claw back") the previously reimbursed amount. The Clawback is recorded as a negative Inventory Reimbursement event (they charge you):

Most likely you will first stumble upon Step 2 transaction in your Transaction reports, and you won't be able to easily track down what was the original reason for the reimbursement and what date it happened.

To find the original event, you will have to go to your Reimbursements Report on Seller Central:

It becomes clear from Reimbursement Report, that the item was lost by the warehouse and 12 days later found again.

Shopkeeper will track both the Reimbursement and the Clawback, and assign both financial transactions to the affected ASIN:

Shopkeeper will also account for the fact that when you loose a unit, you incur Manufacturing and Shipping costs for it.

Let's say your costs for one unit are these:

When Amazon looses your item and sends you some money for it to reimburse you, then you want to offset that income with your costs for the lost item - manufacturing, shipping, import tax, etc. Otherwise it would just look like you made 12.95 in profit.

Shopkeeper subtracts your costs for the unit, on the day Amazon looses it:

When the clawback is issued and reimbursement gets reversed 12 days later, Shopkeeper puts back the Manufacturing and other custom costs for your product, to your balance.

Because Amazon found your lost unit, it means you don't want to actually show the costs yet - the item is still in your warehouse. Manufacturing and other costs of goods will be applied when the next sale comes in or another unit is lost.

Missing from Inbound Clawback is also a Reversal Reimbursement, but applied specifically in cases where a previous reimbursement was issued due to units missing in the inbound delivery process.

For example, if UPS truck was bringing 300 units to Amazon warehouse, but only 200 arrived - Amazon will issue a Reimbursement for 100 units to you. If they later magically find the missing units, Amazon will "claw back" the reimbursed amount from you:

CReturn Wrong Item

CReturn Wrong item is also called CRETURN_WRONG_ITEM.

CRETURN_WRONG_ITEM is a reimbursement, issued to you by Amazon on FBA orders, when a customer returns a wrong item to the Amazon warehouse after a refund.

So basically customer buys a 32GB USB Stick from you, files a refund, and then sends back in the wrong item, for example, 10GB USB Stick instead.

This is similar to normal Inventory Reimbursement, when a customer does not return the item back to Amazon in 45 days. With Inventory Reimbursement, when an item is refunded, but not physically returned to the warehouse in 45 days - Amazon charges your customer and gives you a reimbursement for the item.

The same happens with CReturn Wrong Item Reimbursement. When a customer returns the item back to Amazon, but it's not the item he purchased, Amazon assumes that he did not return the item and charges the customer for it, reimbursing you at the same time.

Here is how you will see CRETURN_WRONG_ITEM reimbursement in Shopkeeper:

Instead of showing $-27.20 loss due to a refund, Shopkeeper takes into account Reimbursement for this unit, and shows you total profit of $2.28.

The way Shopkeeper shows it together in one view, lets you see a more complete picture of what happened with this particular order. Now you know that each refunded item which is not returned properly, actually makes you $2.28 USD in profit.

You should be happy when customers are Switcheroos or Forgetfuls. Amazon charges them and you recoup some money from a refund, when normally you would be just loosing money.

CReturn Wrong Item reimbursement is only issued automatically on AFN (Amazon-fulfilled) orders. That is, only when Amazon is the one handling the returns.

If your order was MFN (Merchant-fulfilled), then you will have to file a SAFE-T claim, to get a similar reimbursement.

Note: this is an article in Progress, another 49 fees to be added in the next two months.

Paulina

I am the founder of Shopkeeper and an Amazon seller myself. When I started selling on nine different Amazon marketplaces, including Amazon Japan, I realized there were no software tools on the market which would sum up my sales from all countries. I also did not like the cluttered, spreadsheet look of
most apps. So Shopkeeper was born. My articles are primarily about software tools for Amazon sellers and case studies where I explore all things Amazon.